The third year of Thumbtack.com’s business friendliness survey is now online, and now that there are a few years of results, we thought it was a good opportunity to build some memory into their survey findings and see what the results were. The survey draws on data from over 12,000 small business owners and ranks states and metropolitan areas in terms of overall business friendliness, ease of starting a business, ease of hiring, regulations, health & safety, employment, labor & hiring, tax code, licensing, environmental, zoning, and training & networking programs. For our rankings we’ve simply taken the city level data and weighted the 2014 results as half of our final results, and the 2013 and 2012 results as a quarter of our final results each. Check out the 10 most business-friendly cities in America.

NOTE: In the event that towns were not ranked for a given year, a score equivalent to the median of all cities ranked in that year was given to them. This only occurred twice in the rankings.

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